When I was a child, many people in big U.S. cities and near industrial plants were dying prematurely from air pollution. Waterways in or downstream of cities and industry were unsafe to swim or fish in. Bald eagles were dying from DDT accumulation. The link between environmental health and human well-being was starkly obvious.
Indeed, the motivation for foundational U.S. environmental legislation was the impact of polluted air and water on human health, and the impact of the loss of nature on human enjoyment and welfare. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 all passed with bipartisan support during the administration of Republican President Richard Nixon.
The memories of such obvious and widespread environmental degradation are now distant for many and nonexistent for most Americans. The costs of environmental protection are, however, still experienced by all. For example, it is hard, slow, and expensive to get permission to build anything on private or public property. As a result, environmental, climate, and energy policies have become increasingly divisive and partisan. These divisions also tap into a tension at the heart of U.S. history: individual liberty vs. constraints on liberty by government.
Nevertheless, I have hope that bipartisan agreement in the U.S. Congress can soon break this logjam. Both sides are realizing that the regulation and litigation they use against each other have produced far more paralysis than progress.
A major reason for the impasse, as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson diagnose in their new book, “Abundance,” is that both environmentalists and their opposition have traditionally framed their priorities in terms of scarcity.
The first Earth Day in April 1970 was framed around scarcity — the idea that we as a collective must protect the one planet we inhabit. The zeitgeist was captured by the publication in 1972 of “The Limits to Growth.” Building anything big became suspect. This mindset encouraged every individual to shrink their environmental footprint for the greater good, and environmentalists sought to have such individual choices enforced by government regulation.
Trump presidential directives are also framed in terms of scarcity—procuring scarce minerals and protecting scarce jobs and housing from immigrants. In this mindset, the answer to scarcity is not for each of us to curtail our appetites and follow Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dictum that “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” Instead, the Trumpian response is to punch your neighbor’s nose even harder and get the scarce thing they have.
Both scarcity mindsets stoke fear, whereas a mindset of abundance — more energy, more housing — fosters the hope needed for creative action. How do we get back to a point of potential common ground appropriate for the 2020s?
As Klein and Thompson argue, one component of the way forward will be to lower regulatory barriers to building things that are now scarce, especially housing and new energy plants. Substantial partisan differences will continue to exist about what kind of energy plants to build, but a shared goal for more energy could fuel bipartisan compromise for building bigger, faster, and cheaper.
Solar farms, wind farms, industrial scale batteries, cross country transmission lines, national networks of EV chargers, mass transit, and high-density housing are all essential to provide high living standards for more people at a lower per capita cost to the environment. But thoughtful trade-offs evaluated quickly and decisively are a key to building these things at a reasonable price. The multilayered permitting approaches that are the legacy of 1970s environmental legislation have accreted to leave little room for reasonable and quick adjudication where one good thing (e.g., livable future climate) must be traded off against another (replacing a pasture with a solar farm).
As another example, Cornell architect and legal scholar Sara Bronin highlights in her 2024 book, “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World,” zoning regulations are often substantial hurdles to overcoming the scarcity of affordable housing. They too often prohibit multifamily dwellings, require large minimum lot sizes, wide setbacks, and lots of parking. They often fail to consider natural hazard zones. Zoning reforms could enable denser, cheaper housing near mass transit and away from flood zones, lowering per capita greenhouse gas emissions and increasing climate resilience.
For New York’s Westchester County and Long Island communities, Bronin’s collaborative report with Cornell Atkinson and the Regional Plan Association illustrates these problems and potential solutions with graphics like the one below. According to the report, the current residential zoning development capacity allows less than half of the total housing needed by 2040, leaving a net gap between likely demand and what zoning would allow of approximately 680,000 units. Zoning reform at federal, state, and local levels could fix that.
Earlier this month, Cornell Atkinson celebrated a number of success stories where technological and conceptual innovation from university research prompted policy innovation, which in turn prompted scaling of innovation in the marketplace. In the U.S. we need such coupled innovations at a grand scale to make possible the construction of a future world with abundant clean energy distributed on an efficient national grid that powers abundant homes and more mass transit. We also need to provide more sustainably produced nutritious food and conservation spaces, challenges that Klein and Thompson mostly ignore. Nevertheless, agreement between the political left and right on a vision of building scarce things better, faster, and cheaper would be a giant first step toward a future of abundance.
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